One of the things that SF usually doesn't do well is make the future look like a place people actually want to live in. From Promethus to the Matrix to insert the blank, the future generally sucks. However, the unbridled optimism of the hypebois and the grande designs of the futurists are equally off-putting; a future where you can still drink a Coke, drive a car, and eat some Pocky feels like it could actually happen.

So assuming that we don't turn into a bunch of self-hating cutters overnight, what is the future looking like? Economic freedom means that people get to do what they want, and one thing that people seem interested in doing is preserving the past. By this, I mean vintage motels, cabins from the '70's, house preservation, records, and so on. Will crypto dip its toe into preservation of historic artifacts?

So far there aren't any historic preservation coins, but can you see it? It could fund local projects, giving the various old homes a shot in the arm; it could be something distributed as party favors to those touring elite mansions; it could be something distributed by a very olde foundation coming to grips with a younger audience.

That's just one possibility; I'm really surprised that vinyl folks haven't gotten into this. Of course that would open the doors to record companies (or collections of artists) having their own coins, and other record companies refusing to accept those coins as payment. You can't have music without drama, after all. :) Another angle here is music preservation folks, like those who capture the folk songs of distinct people groups (link) or those who try to capture the sound of a particular era. The slogans write themselves -- "Save music! Buy Vinylcoin today."

But speaking of artists, although this has not been their explicit intent, some have gone beyond the Audius model and created NFTs of music, thereby preserving it. Visual artists have led the way on this, by creating NFTs as digital simaculara of paintings. The most common model is creating NFTs without any physical backing, but even that preserves the digital art itself.

The future is always both familiar and strange. Crypto as a currency is no different than anything else that stands for some measure of value; perhaps even now we have a peaceful cabin with a solar-powered battery that charges a guy's laptop that he uses to move crypto. This would be the strangely familiar collision of future and past that SF might someday get right.